1. Field of the Invention
The device of this invention relates to a system of electronic translation of spoken language and more particularly relates to a portable system whereby a user can have verbal statements translated from one language to another at the location of the user.
2. Description of the Prior Art
At present there are language translation computers which have been developed to translate an inputted language into another language which is outputted usually to a computer screen or printer. These systems are relatively new and can be utilized to translate entire sentences. Such systems are known in the prior art such as disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,654,798 to Taki et al for a System of Simultaneous Translation into a Plurality of Languages with Sentence-forming Capabilities. In these systems the desired sentence to be translated from one language is inputted into the computer and the system processes it and then outputs the sentence translated in the desired language. These systems, though, are usually office bound and need computers of large size to run the programming. The programs apply a combination of syntactics and semantics to decipher and translate the foreign language. The programs analyze foreign language on a sentence-by-sentence basis. For each sentence the program searches its internal dictionary, checking each word and identifying the verb by the process of elimination. After identifying the verb, the program identifies the subject and any modifiers. After dissecting the sentence word by word, the program determines the meaning of the sentence as a whole by sensing how words interact to affect the sentence's meaning. It accomplishes this by comparing the order of the words in the sentence with what is stored in the computer regarding various word-combinations having distinct meanings. Such computers can generate translations in a number of different languages. Another recent patent is U.S. Pat. No. 4,641,264 to Nitta et al for a Method of Automatic Translation between Natural Languages. This patent discloses a further system for the translation of entire sentences. Speech recognition systems to input spoken words into a computer also exist such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,363,102 to Holmgren et al which discloses a speaker recognition system. These types of systems will recognize spoken words and input a signal representing that spoken word into a language translation system when put together therewith as described below.